Exhumed histories: Trieste and the politics of (exclusive) victimhood

In Italy, the official sites for remembering World War II and its conclusion have increasingly become places at which divided memories are reproduced, rather than unity affirmed. This is most evident in the conflict of the past few years surrounding 25 April, the Day of the Republic or the Festa della Liberazione, which commemorates efforts by Italian Resistance movements in the north to rise up against the German Nazi occupiers. This date provided perhaps the central ritual moment legitimizing the democratic First Republic, founded in 1945 and in existence until the Tangentopoli corruption scandals led to its demise in 1992. While never wholly uncontested, until recently 25 April for the most part symbolized liberation. Today, however, some members of the Italian Right declare that 25 April brought liberation only to some parts and populations of Italy, while for others it signaled the beginning of communist reprisals and persecution. From the other direction, some voices on the Left have instead urged abolishing the holiday, given Berlusconi’s transformation of the 2003 celebration into a panegyric to American military aid. Italian President Ciampi instead articulates the position of those who believe that the traditional values of the Resistance and 25 April cannot, indeed must not, be forgotten or reinterpreted. To some degree, this wider debate over how to interpret the war’s end has nationalized local debates about memory in Trieste, where the war’s conclusion and the city’s occupation by Yugoslav troops for 40 days in April and May 1945, portended ‘liberation’ for some (the city’s Slovene minority and its left-wing activists) and ‘oppression’ for others (many ethnic Italians and members of the non-communist resistance). It is in Trieste, for example, that contestation over the meanings of 25 April has perhaps been most acute and where, in the last two or three years, local ritual commemorations have elicited intense national debate and discussion. At the same time, these debates over memory also prove quite specific to Trieste, where not only political ideology (Left/Right) but also ethno-national sentiment (Slovene/Italian) has fractured the memory of the population in the postwar period. Commemorations of atrocities—of those carried out by the Nazis and fascists in the extermination camp of Risiera di San Sabba, on the one hand, and by the Yugoslav partisans in the karstic pits known as the foibe, on the other—have for over a half-century served as key vehicles by which distinctions between the Slovene minority and Italian majority are reproduced. In addition, the memory of the tragic events of